Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Is the real problem that Facebook and Microsoft (Outlook) both are walled gardens? Apparently (stupid) Plaxo for chose to play slimey with Facebook as well as Scoble.

All this cries out to me that there must be some truly open solutions for the truly *real* problem: all these social needs would benefit from a solution that is as open as the general web itself.

I write my own blog and link to other bloggers. Why shouldn't I just as easily run my own self-description and contact list and link to other's self-descriptions contact lists, no matter which social publishing system my contacts are using? 

That's the ultimate direction, right? It's just that Microsoft has its lock on the "social network" in the business world and Facebook has its lock on so many young people. Does anyone think either of them will hold on to those locks over the next five years?

Five years from now Outlook will probably be mostly gone from IT (which CEO or shareholder wants their corporations to continue paying for that?) By then Facebook will have been out-innovated as well, probably by one or more organizations with a more open, integrative, creative flair.

Sorry to go off on a tangent but this specific Scoble / legal / illegal data scraping thing seems to be a brief blip on a sign post that is rapidly fading into the distant past. It's not important who's legally able to what in the moment, it's where all this is heading.

Comment by Terry

Hmm, considering that it is difficult to obtain money to support a free and open social network platform maybe the solution is to implement a P2P social network system. Any clever St programmer willing to tackle that?

Clearly we'll end up with more than one social networking system.Just as clearly, they will be linked, free, and open, mostly.

I'd bet it is also difficult to obtain money to run a linked, free, and open blogging system, and yet there are a handful of those. I suspect those blogging systems may take on other "social aspects" over time, and through the use of conventions and/or standards, those social aspects will begin to converge while becoming or remaining linked, free, and open.

For example, why would Plaxo have to be involved in getting your address change in Outlook over the net into my contact list in Lotus Notes? They shouldn't. We have Atom format and publishing, and all the other things in place for general "blogging". What's the difference between that an doing something similar for a bit more structure around semi-formal "social content"?

 Not much, I think.

Seems I recall some talk of hiring people to harvest captchas manually.  If you really want to "scrape" all this data, you can do it manually.  This seems like something that could be farmed out cheap to overseas labor :)